American has a growing love affair with the end of the world. Why this fondness with all things apocalyptical? Novels like The Road by Cormac McCarthy and The Stand by Stephen King are perennially perched atop a dozen bestseller’s List.
Motion picture films like I Am legend, adapted from Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, and The Postman by David Brin have earned more than respectable box office returns. But, more important is the growing success of the genre as a whole (films, literature, fine arts, and even heavy metal and gothic sound tracks). Its mushrooming popularity reveals a dark undercurrent of the American psychic, manifesting an obsession with post-apocalyptic visions. Hollywood has already pulled the trigger on several apocalyptic thrillers aimed at teens and pre-teen audiences.
While significant groundwork was laid during the 1920’s and 1930’s, the real work was done in the aftermath of War World II. Science fiction writers imagined a planet occupied by alien life forms, or wrote of meteor showers leveling cities and bringing civilization to the brink.
Others world-enders pursued a more religious theme, threading the stories with the ultimate triumph of the forces of God over the forces of the ungodly. Christian fiction writers, borrowing from the Old Testament, wrote of end days as prophesied in the Book of the Revelations. However, early religious fiction was limited to a paltry audience of apocalyptic aficionados and religious extremist. Nonetheless, by the start of the new millennium Left Behind, the blockbuster novel by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, took the genre mainstream.
Secular visions of the apocalypse would have to wait a little while longer. American popular culture was beginning to embrace the-end-of-world-has-we-know-it.
Once everyone laughed and pointed at the psycho parading the end-is-coming sign, tolling the bell of Armageddon and preaching salvation. Ironically, now, Hollywood is financing those who would warn of impending disaster, and point to the dark omens. And, they do with digitalized high resolution film and surround sound.
The dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and the Arms Race opened the door to the fear that one day the chickens could someday come home to the roost. The very same fear expressed comically in the classic Dr. Strangelove: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. Bomb shelters, fallout drills and the emergence of the survivalist market was testimony to Americans growing apocalyptic dread. Total destruction became a real possibility for millions of Americans. Nowhere is post-apocalyptic American better depicted than in Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank and in Canticles of Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller.
But, America’s growing infatuation with a domestic brand of Armageddon reached its apex with the 9/11 tragedy. The image of New Yorkers fleeing the crashing towers and the toxic clouds of the death was broadcast over and over until the image was emblazoned in our indelibly in our minds. America’s exalted sense of invincibility came crashing down with the WTC, our feeling of security forever buried in the rubble.
However, there may be other reasons for the growing popularity of doom and gloom. American technological and economic achievements helped her to amass great wealth. The American standard of living is admired and envied the world over. In the history of the world, no society has achieved as much, so quickly.
Yet, no one knows more than Americans the price of that progress. While few American would trade their way of life for any other, psychologists have long documented the mounting feelings of alienation, acute anxiety and depression among the working masses. Most Americans at some points have felt like interchangeable cogs living a purposeless life in service of corporate American. Thus, no one knows better the double-edged sword of progress.
This may explain Amer

Barack Obama’s run for the presidency is making history. Some would contribute the groundbreaking event to the Civil Right movement, to American liberalism, or to a voter backlash resulting from the war in Iraq and to the failure of the government to prevent 9/11. Not doubt all played some part. But, one of the most overlooked factors is the increasingly prominent roles of black actors in blockbuster films.
I never thought that I would live to see a black man nominated to run for the most important political office in the United States, or the world for that matter. Obama’s impressive showing is not just a victory for black people, but a great victory for American.
I can remember in the 1960’s attending afternoon matinees with my friends. Almost every Saturday the local theater offered up a carte du jour of Tarzan of the Apes, Elvis Presley, or John Wayne. Unlike our fathers, we were spared having to digest portions of Steppin Fitchit’s monkey shine or Amos and Andy’s buffoonery. In their rare appearances, black actor donned the roles of slaves, maids, butlers and servants, oftentimes with more than a touch of minstrel antics and Stagolee-like bravado. Hollywood still preferred black caricatures over black characters.
Importantly, during the fifties, Sidney Portier and Harry Belafonte won Hollywood acclaim in dramatic roles and planted the seeds of progressive change in the film industry. Some argued that the roles were assimilations role, Uncle Tom roles. To them I say: some unsatisfied with the pace of progress called both Martin Luther King and Booker T. Washington uncle toms. But, no one today can refute the fact that they knocked down barriers and reshape the way American thought about color. During this same period, Hollywood turned out quality films like Carmen Jones (with the great Dorothy Dandridge) and A Raisin in the Sun (with its all-star cast). The American public (blacks and whites) helped to turn them into both into box office gold.
In the seventies, Hollywood churned out films designed exploit black people’s hunger for black heroes: Super Fly, Across 110th Street and Shaft were created to meet the demand. Blacks got their heroes, but at a dear price. In contrast to roles of the fifties, black roles lacked depth and were robbed it there universality. The world stage was narrowed to ghetto backdrops, where pimps, drug dealers and gun totting ruffians replaced Buckwheat, Black Sambo, and Picaninny. The black image continued to suffer from the legacy of racism. While these ‘blaxploitation’ films afforded many actors the opportunity to apply their trade, the stereotypical roles would typecast many of them in the long run.
Did Hollywood purposefully set out to degrade black people? Let just say that Hollywood has always played it safe and rarely ventured beyond what they thought white America wanted to see. So, for the most part, Hollywood can be accused being cowards in the faces of racist tradition. But, time would suggest thatHollywood should have given white audiences more credit.
By the nineties, Television depiction of the blacks made the giant leap from “Goodtimes” to “The Cosby Show”. Meanwhile, Hollywood was casting black as generals (Morgan Freeman in Virus), corporate moguls (Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea), and presidents (Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact, even God (again, Morgan Freeman in Bruce Almighty). Ironically, just a few years ago, Chris Rock starred in the film, Head of State, which figured a black man running for president. Although, suggesting a slim and unlikely possibility (due to a broad cultural schism), the film gave a glimpse of things to come.
Thousands of white voters lined up for hours to gain admission to the venues where Obama was speaking revealed a fundamental change in America. I couldn’t help but conclude that Hollywood had been powerful agent. Although, I’m not suggesting that Hollywood alone prepared the way. But

God, Man and Creation

By

Pharaoh



I've passed beyond this world and experienced worlds greater in number than all the grains of sands on all the beaches of the world. I have bathed in the truth of the living waters, found eternity in the moment and seen the universe in a grain of sand. All imaged boundaries faded in to a forgotten dream. Through the eternal spirit, the totality of creation has been revealed to me.

I was fed Nirvana from the open hand of the Great Buddha, awoke to the dawn of the Christ Spirit, bowed in prayer with the Prophet Mohammed at an eternal sunset, meditated in the garden of creation beside Lao Tzu, and was guided to the Great Hall of Souls by Upanishads, Keeper of the collective consciousness of man. Freed of all earthly chains, my soul transcended.

Beyond the veil of the material world, laid worlds of freely interpenetrating spectrums of light energy emanating from a vibratory essence. Starting with a creative pulsation of divine volition, man begins his journey into being. Down through the spiritual, astral and material planes he descends. This emanation of light grows dimmer and dimmer as the soul descends to the low levels of consciousness. Finally, the eternal substance becomes manifest in earthly clothing.

Man's manifestation on the material plain is part of the divine process of creation, where life acts upon life to eternally perpetuate itself. All becoming all. Essence preceding existence. The One becomes the many without losing any part of itself. The Whole is present in all of it parts as the part is present in the Whole. As the light of creation resides in man, man possesses a gushing fountain of unconditional potentiality.

Sadly, in the lower conscious state, he remembers not his wholeness, his oneness with all of creation. Instead, he remained trapped by the very tools he uses to view the world. His logical mind aided by the sensory organs spits his reality, casting him afloat in the waters of life.

Most souls are held under the siren's lure of the five senses. The enlightened; however, see with mystical eyes, hear with ears born of the immaterial, and feel textures of countless variety. Their awareness encompasses the astral side of the five senses as well as a sixth and seventh senses. The sixth-sense exist as intuition and the seventh as thought transfer. Everyone has these synchronistic experiences at one time or another, but lacking knowledge of the cosmic laws of the universe, they brush them off as coincidences or unexplainable phenomena.


Some heightened souls, while on earth, cultivate their spiritual nature, surpassing the use of the five senses to achieve extraordinary vision. These souls may either use their powers for the good of the planet or for selfish enterprises thus inviting calamity and lost of power. By giving in to their bestial nature, these few retard humanity's spiritual restoration.

They act as false prophets (betraying God and man) steering humanity away form there light of truth. Their world is flooded with negative thought-forms that vibrate at base frequencies. Humanity is then held in the grips of perpetual slumber. He is unable to awaken to the eternal sunrise and his rightful place in the universal order.

These thought-forms fasten man's linear perception of the past, present, and future. His time machine provides a spatial and temporal corridor that plays host to his object reality. At the center of his imaginary universe is his created self, his ego self.

In the ego dominated world, man's lower nature rules supreme. Believing that he exist as apart of yet apart from all of creation, man ignores his immortality and wages all out war against what he perceives to be a treat to his continued existence.

The ego nature is exclusively concerned with the finite world, a world of objectives. T